The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

Thursday, April 2, 2026

“Cartoons”

Word Count:  750

 

One of the disappointments of living in Fort Collins is our local newspaper.  Little of the news is local, most items fed by the syndicate to which it belongs.  Where have all the local reporters gone?  Who’s going to cover the commissioner meetings or the next No Kings protest?  Worse, it lacks what I always turn to first in a paper: the opinion page.  You will find no columns, no letters to the editor, no editorials, no political cartoons.  Worse than that, it’s a newspaper that lacks what I turn the pages to second:  the comics.  How can a newspaper call itself a newspaper without Hagar, Zits, Pickles, or Beetle Bailey?  Thank goodness my subscription to The Danville News arrives by mail.  God bless authentic local papers. 

 

Bless those cartoonists with their eye on foolish those who can’t laugh at themselves.  I love cartoons.   Sunday comics.  Calvin and Hobbes.  Far Side.  Political cartoons.  A favorite?  Bill Mauldin’s cartoons from World War II that martinet prima donna Patton tried to censor.  I relish especially the cartoons from the New Yorker Magazine.  Young me spent hours turning the pages of The New Yorker Magazine Cartoon Collection in my favorite haunt when growing up:  the household library.

 

Even at six years old, I got the joke.  It was as funny as those spectacular movies depicting Jesus as an Aryan with flowing blonde hair.  Come on, history knows Moses didn’t look like Charleston Heston. 

 

Here’s another favorite, one with delightfully sick and twisted humor:  The cartoon shows the Addams family gleefully pouring boiling oil from their rooftop onto Christmas Carolers.  I said it was twisted. 

 

Let’s applaud those cartoons mocking whiney Trump.  Trump’s worldview?  A world of shoe shine boys, maids, and croupiers who serve the rich.  What a waste of skin. 

 

Here’s one with that conveyed Doonesbury’s thorny wit, skewering that which deserved skewering. I had it taped to my office door at the church.  It ran originally during the Vietnam War.  It depicts two pilots piloting a bomber.  Say’s co-pilot:  “I remember how the bombs fell away from the plane, catching the sunlight as they disappeared into the clouds…and then when they finally hit the valley below came alive with blinding lights.”  Next panel:  “With all the flashes and smoke and such it seemed almost like a cray Fourth of July celebration spectacle.”  Last panel:  “Couse, I imagine it looked different from the other end.”

 

From my research at the New York Public Library for my college thesis, I still have tucked away cartoons I copied from the microfiche archives of ‘The Masses,’ a radical, bohemian magazine that was published from 1914 until the beginning of World War I.   ‘The Masses’ got shut down by the Post Office on orders from the government because it dared criticize the United State’s rampant militarization and Robber Baron profiteering.   Is there anything new under the sun?

 

Then I came across one cartoon from the New Yorker.  It rocked my world.  It shook my perception of the world.  Cartoons do that.    The cartoon shows a line of people at a drug store cash register – An India Indian, an Eskimo, someone perhaps from Japan, a Black African-American, a White European-American, a Sheik from Arabia, and a Native American Indian.  Panic shows on the face of the pharmacist behind the cash register who yells at his partner:  “Joe, these people say they want flesh-colored Band-Aids.” 

 

Even at six years old I got it.  Funny, funny. 

 

So what color is flesh colored Band-Aids? 

 

I’m rather fond of flesh.  I rather like flesh, despite its tendency to let you down sometimes.  Such is the price of mortality.  That and the changes that go with this price of life.  Am I still that adolescent scamp who use to love climbing trees and could run a fast 440 for the High School track team?  No.  And yes.  Still that boy with his ironic outlook who expects better from this world. 

 

This graying and portly and dreadfully comical body, which is me, isn’t the same body when a baby sitting on my grandpa’s lap wearing his fedora or boyishly running around the roof of my house or playing adult soccer with great friends or holding my own babies.  Yet, it is the same me.  True with you too.  

 

Flesh:  in all its precious and varied shapes and sizes and colors and abilities.  Flesh that can even create flesh.   And all of us sharing the same breath that makes our flesh alive.  Funny indeed.